CINEMATOGRAPH: SANDRA GIBSON + LUIS RECODER

Each January, Riverviews welcomes the new year with a unique, precedent-setting show.  This year, we welcome the film installations of internationally renowned artists, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder in Cinématograph.  The show will open with a First Friday reception on January 6th and will feature an artists’ talk the following Friday, January 13th.

First Friday Opening Reception: January 6th, 5:30-8:00pm

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have exhibited their work at major international art museums, galleries, and film festivals such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Light Industry (Brooklyn), Redcat (Los Angeles), Conversations at the Edge (Chicago), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa), Sundance Film Festival (Park City), Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam), MuHKA (Antwerp), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), and Image Forum (Tokyo). They are currently artists-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

One of the first motion picture cameras ever to be invented doubled as a film projector. This “primitive” apparatus was given the name Cinématographe in 1895 by its founders, Auguste and Louis Lumière. Camera and projector in one, the same strip of celluloid film was exposed, printed, and projected in the selfsame machine. The title of this exhibition borrows the original model of the cinema as a multiple and complex idea that perhaps foreshadowed movements and practices in the contemporary field of “expanded cinema.”

Gibson and Recoder describe the installations in their own words:

In our installation work, we use projected light to articulate space and time. Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theater. To remove it from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift, elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us.